AALL Spectrum Blog

The AALL Spectrum® Blog is published by the American Association of Law Libraries. Submissions from AALL members and other members of the legal community are highly encouraged. Opinions and editorial views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of AALL. AALL does not assume any responsibility for statements advanced by contributors. The previous Spectrum Blog was located at aallspectrum.wordpress.com.

Many organizations are converting titles that they have subscribed to in print for many years to digital formats. Usually this move is a money-saver for organizations. Sometimes it’s a matter of convenience. Or in other situations needed titles may only be available in digital formats according to the publisher. Depending on the type of law library, there will be a different decision making process. In smaller firms the law librarian in partnership with the financial department head together make decisions on whether to convert titles to digital. In larger firms there would likely be a bigger team making the decision and in academic or research libraries the director and a panel of librarians and possibly faculty would make such a decision.

Once a decision has been made to convert from print to digital, several other things also need to take place. First and foremost, there should be a policy for the actions that need to take place following the conversion. There needs to be notice provided to library users that print titles have converted to digital and may no longer be updated. In a small setting, this can be notice provided in an email or memo to users. There also should be a warning or disclaimer on the print title itself that it has no longer been updated by a given date. The warning should be immediately visible to the library user who picks up the volume, preferably on the spine of the print volume itself. All library staff should be educated on which titles are current and which have converted to digital. The library catalog also needs to be updated to reflect the conversion with specific dates.

Hand-in-hand with a policy on conversion, education needs to take place, conducted by library staff for users who may be unfamiliar with how to access the titles digitally. In organizations where there are many users unfamiliar with the subject, giving several opportunities for library users to be present for the training is best. Library staff also needs to prepare for the inevitable library user who has ignored notifications and is unfamiliar with accessing titles digitally and needs something from one of the digital titles quickly.

With a dedicated policy and in-house education opportunities, the transition from print to digital can be relatively smooth.

“During the first hours of any war the information that profoundly shocks the planet can be summed up in four words: The library is burning.” Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire, 235 (2007).

We have all heard and seen the horrors of the recent conflict in Iraq and Syria. In addition to the abhorrent human suffering, it is estimated that more than 100,000 books and manuscripts have been burned by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) since last December. Given the scale of the human tragedy, the destruction of books is not likely to be what most “profoundly shocks the planet.” Yet, this heinous destruction should not go unnoticed. As described by the UNESCO Director-General: “[this] cultural cleansing . . .adds to the systematic destruction of heritage and the persecution of minorities, [and] seeks to wipe out the cultural diversity that is the soul of the Iraqi people.”

Among the materials lost were “manuscripts from the 18th century, Syriac books printed in Iraq’s first printing house in the 19th century, books from the Ottoman era, Iraqi newspapers from the early 20th century, and treasured antiques like an astrolabe and sand glass used by the ancient Arabs.” UNESCO reported the loss of law and philosophy texts. The library also contained materials on subjects traditionally censored in Iraq, such as Communism, socialism, and sex – housed in special rooms devoted to the private collections of as many as one hundred Iraqi founding families. Even the Library’s website has been suspended.

The destruction of the Mosul Library represents one of a series of attacks on libraries, bookstores, and university collections in Iraq and Syria. Some institutions having sustained particularly heavy damage include “the archives of a Sunni Muslim Library, the library of the 265-year-old Latin Church and Monastery of the Dominican Fathers, and the Mosul Museum Library with works dating back to 5000 BC.” Only months before the Mosul Library destruction, ISIS denounced Mosul University, which was closed and converted to barracks, “along with the colleges of law, fine arts, physical education, languages, social sciences and archaeology.” Each school, including the school of law, had its own library, which was looted. In the Mosul University Central Library, ISIS militants “constructed a huge pyre of scientific and cultural texts as university students watched in horror.”

While UNESCO specifically mentioned the loss of legal texts in Mosul, many relevant legal documents are preserved online through the Iraqi Local Governance Law Library, “including local laws, orders, decisions, and regulations now being published by provinces in monthly legal gazettes”. However, legal documents published before 2010 are not available there. The Iraq Legal Database, created in 2008, contains a wealth of additional information, including “approximately 30,000 legal texts and more than 7,000 laws, 4,000 ministerial decrees, 3,000 regulations, and 5,000 declarations passed since 1917.” However, the website does not appear to be accessible at this time.

Rebuilding or replacing a physical collection in a region currently a “self-declared ISIS caliphate” may well be impossible or simply result in more destruction. Organizations and foreign governments, are seeking to prevent further loss. Partially in response to the destruction caused by ISIS, the U.S. House of Representatives recently introduced H. R. 1493, “a bill to protect and preserve international cultural property at risk due to political instability, armed conflict, or natural or other disasters. . .” This bill aims to “coordinate and promote efforts to protect international cultural property” by increasing communication between relevant stakeholders and reducing the incentive to steal cultural property by reducing consumer demand for trafficked and illegally-traded artifacts.

Some international organizations are looking for ways to help mitigate the harm already done. The Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) has embarked on an ambitious task called Project Mosul, reconstructing Mosul’s Cultural Artifacts in a four-dimensional virtual museum. Only two weeks after the destruction of the Mosul Library, “researchers from ITN-DCH, IAPP, and 4D-CH-WORLD” began the project, crowd-sourcing photographs of the artifacts and creating digital exhibits. “The team is [] calling on volunteers to help them to sort and tag pictures, process them, [and] take care of coding.” While a digital rendering cannot completely replace an original, at least items of cultural significance will be available in some form to future generations.

Similar digital reconstruction projects might provide hope for recreating some of the rare print volumes lost in Mosul and the surrounding areas. One Dominican Monk, Father Najeeb Micheel, has been photographing and digitizing early Christian texts in Iraq “with help from Father Stewart’s Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota.” Unfortunately, he was forced to stop his work and flee ISIS with only one truck of books and artifacts from the 50,000-volume collection. Perhaps through a crowd-sourcing effort, more photographs and scanned images can be used to revive bits of the print materials that were lost.